1. Field of the Invention
The invention is related to the field of communications systems, and in particular, to broadcasting video channels using Ethernet technology.
2. Statement of the Problem
People traditionally receive television channels over a regular TV antenna, a coaxial cable, or a satellite dish. The advent of the Internet now allows people to receive Internet Protocol (IP) based video over their computers. To receive video over a computer, a user selects a video clip. For instance, the video clip may be a news clip from the CNN web site. The user's computer sends a request for the video clip to a server for the CNN web site. The user's computer has a unique IP address that it includes in the request. The server on the CNN web site receives the request and transmits the video clip to the IP address of the user's computer. The user is able to view the video clip over the computer.
If the user's computer is connected to an Ethernet LAN, the user's computer also has an Ethernet card that is assigned a unique Ethernet address for that LAN. An Ethernet switch for the LAN receives the video clip from the CNN server and formats the video clip in Ethernet frames. Each of the Ethernet frames includes the Ethernet address of the user's computer. The user's computer listens to the Ethernet LAN for the frames having it's Ethernet address and collects those frames. The user's computer then displays the video clip.
Unfortunately, video clips are currently transmitted as unicast streams to the requesting computer. Unicast streams can waste valuable bandwidth and resources. Multiple copies of the same video clip may be transmitted over the same communication link, which can overload the communication link. Considering the size of video clips, this could be a tremendous waste of bandwidth, especially for communications links like DSL. These problems are further illustrated in FIG. 1.
Also, Ethernet cards are currently configured to listen to a single Ethernet address on an Ethernet LAN. The Ethernet address assigned to the Ethernet card of a computer is fixed and the Ethernet card does not listen for other addresses. This unfortunately limits the data a computer can pull off of an Ethernet LAN.